Francis Berger
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An Idea Concerning God's Unresponsiveness

4/24/2020

13 Comments

 
Over the past month or so I have encountered many comments on various blogs in which the commenters explicitly cited God's apparent unresponsiveness in light of everything that has occurred in connection with the birdemic. Some commenters lamented feeling abandoned by God; others expressed disappointment at the perceived and seemingly conspicuous lack of signs or communication from God. For many, the church closures did little more than rub salt into these despondent wounds. 

Though I don't agree with these perspectives at all, I can understand where many of these commenters are coming from. I suspect most of these commenters are good, solid Christians who pray daily, read the Gospels regularly, and had attended churches before they closed. In other words, they were probably doing everything good, solid Christians are supposed to do. In light of this, I can certainly understand their frustration and discontent. After all, the evil in the world has magnified immensely in the past five or six weeks. Seen from the fixed perspective of most good, solid Christians, God does appear to have been rather unresponsive thus far.

Yet, perhaps there is a reason for God's seeming unresponsiveness - a reason that has everything to do with co-respondence. By co-respondence, I am not referring to an exchange of letters, but rather to the notion that perhaps God's seeming unresponsiveness to us has a great deal to do with our unresponsiveness to Him. 

I cannot believe God has ceased communicating with us. What I can believe is the notion that perhaps our communications with God - those tried and true, good, solid Christian methods of communication that served so well in earlier times - have become inadequate and insufficient in the here and now. By the same token, our adherence to these tried and true methods of communication might very well be making us deaf and blind to God's communication. Simply put, perhaps God does not appear to be responding to us because we are not properly responding to Him. 

I believe God is our loving father, and that he desires what is best for his children. Like all loving fathers, God wants his children to grow up and mature. This entails different approaches to and different levels of communication. God has taken this step forward; we in turn, have not. Put another way, God is trying to talk to us like adults, but we continue to talk and listen to him like adolescents (and fairly apathetic adolescents at that). 

God will respond to us once we understand how we should begin responding to him. Part of responding to him as adults must contain an element of understanding our role as Co-Creators. According to Berdyaev, the next step in Christianity involves not only Man discovering himself in God, but also God discovering Himself in Man. This type of discovery necessitates a new, unprecedented form of co-respondence. It includes viewing God from an entirely new perspective - not as some distant, autocratic ruler one must obsequiously and blindly tremble before and obey, but a relatable friend and partner one can love and work cooperatively with, in the same manner an adult son or daughter can love and work cooperatively with a loving parent. 

The co-creation Berdyaev speaks of involves a recognition of our latent spiritual creativity. This creativity is not the same as or equal to God's, but serves to complement it. By the same token, God's creativity is not the same as Man's, but God's creativity alone no longer appears sufficient. God is not responding to us because our communications with him are not creative. God will respond to us fully the moment we begin creatively communicating with Him. Once we learn to do that, we become Co-Creators. Our creative spirituality will become enhanced through God, and God's creative spirituality will become enhanced through us. The new co-respondence involves a fortifying and enhancement of both God and Man, a fortification and enhancement that can occur only when we understand our creative role. 

Spiritual creativity requires initiative from us. This initiative must derive from freedom. According to William Arkle, once Man shows this initiative, he escapes all determinism and becomes actively creative - to the point that God can no longer accurately predict what Man will do. This is the essence of Co-Creation. This is the essence of the latent spiritual power within us - a latent spiritual power demonstrated fully by Christ. 

To sum up, God may appear unresponsive to us because we are essentially unresponsive to Him. The good, solid, traditional methods of communication are no longer sufficient or adequate. The way forward requires spiritual growing-up by embracing freedom and becoming Co-Creators, and it will likely involve a process akin to Romantic Christianity and Berdyaev's third epoch of Christianity. 
13 Comments
bruce charlton
4/24/2020 16:10:46

@Frank - That puts well what is also my understanding!

It is absurd, arrogant and (ultlimately) evil to say that God is not communicating with us, when he manifestly God is communicating every hour of every day with everybody. But people aren't listening - because they are not attuned to God, and because God is not telling them what they personally want to hear...

Which is something on the lines of making them personally happy here and now, according to their current worldly desires - and without any consideration for eternal happiness of themselves or the rest of the world.

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Francis Berger
4/24/2020 16:21:14

@ Bruce - Yes, that's true. People today are quite attuned to hearing only what they want to hear and disregarding everything else, regardless of how relevant/true/real it is. I also think not listening stems from perceived difficulty. People don't want to do the heavy lifting, but heavy lifting is exactly what is required right now.

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William Wildblood
4/24/2020 18:23:56

It is just as you say. God is communicating with us and doing so all the time but he is doing so on a spiritual level, through impression and intuition. It is up to us to raise our minds up to spiritual levels and not expect to be spoon-fed like spiritual babies. We are not just required to believe nowadays but to know and this knowledge can only be acquired if we work for it by preparing our minds to respond to the Word of God spiritually which means from the soul. God wants us to come up to him and will no longer come down to us except in extreme circumstances and maybe for many of us not even then.

This may sound cruel but is actually a great compliment for he wouldn't do it unless he knew we were capable of it. At least we have to make a start.

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Francis Berger
4/24/2020 20:23:11

'This may sound cruel but is actually a great compliment for he wouldn't do it unless he knew we were capable of it. At least we have to make a start.'

That's a great way of putting it, William. It shows He has confidence in our abilities and potential. Very encouraging and uplifting. Thank you.

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bruce charlton
4/25/2020 18:30:10

"It is up to us to raise our minds up to spiritual levels and not expect to be spoon-fed like spiritual babies. "

Perhaps this is the reason in some cases, and in other individuals it is more that it is only when we meet God part-way that the experience is convincing to us.

At the time I had decided to become a Christian, I has a few answered prayer personal miracles. These were perfectly timed to act as a confirmation for me. But if the same things had happened to me when I was an unbeliever, I would certainly have written them off as a coincidence or luck - on the basis that there was no such thing as miracles, so I *must* be deluding myself.

So, another reason that people don't get communications from God is that they do not believe that such things can and do happen - they lack faith; and instead set God a test to overwhelm them with some event that forces them to believe. However, for a typical modern person - there is no such thing; because absolutely anything that happens can and will be explained-away - leaving that person with his heart even more hardened against faith.

I often think about the Fatima miracles in that way - as astonishing, public, mass-observed an event as could be imagined - and yet for many people it simply led to wild theorising about how the phenomena could be explained away on the basis of weird weather conditions or mass hysteria. The Roman Catholic hierarchy maintained the prophecies as secret.

I suspect that God will have learned from Fatima that miracles of that spectacular kind are counter-productive in the modern world, and that henceforth miracles are targeted for particular purposes and particular individuals.

I have heard that public miracles still occur in places where people have a different attitude - such as Africa; but of course Western people just regard these as tricks played upon the gullible.

Francis Berger
4/25/2020 21:41:05

@ Bruce - Great comment. The callous dismissal communication with God and the possibility of miracles is a hallmark of all materialists who profess to reject all belief in the supernatural. Yet these same people readily accept the miracle of a biological male transforming into a biological female through the sheer power of declaration. A good part of this is obviously purposeful inversion against Creation, but I also think some of it is just the demonic powers trolling their minions. "The supernatural is nonsense - now, accept this bit of supernatural thinking!"

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Epimetheus
4/26/2020 13:58:17

God wants to produce a meta-level change in each human consciousness. If it looks like miracles and spectacles don't actually work to do that, there's no point.

Tons of people have experienced paranormal events - probably the majority of the population. Every single person I've asked in my life has told me about some kind of supernatural weirdness that happened to them. Everyone's seen some kind of supernatural fireworks, but it isn't good enough. Even Christian fireworks fade from memory and lose their power.

Metanoia, that's the only important thing. People think miracles would automatically produce metanoia in the same way they think winning the lottery would automatically produce happiness. It just isn't so - the individual human mind is more sovereign than we realize.

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Francis Berger
4/26/2020 18:21:13

@ Epi - Great comment. I agree, especially the last part.

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Brian T
5/12/2020 05:24:06

Late to the discussion here but........this Sunday's gospel had Jesus telling us that he is the way, truth, and life.

I knew, on some level thatJesus was/is the way......I learned it as a kid and accepted it as true, but didn't think much about it as I got older.

I had a "reversion" experience at about 28 years of age. It involved "Truth". It kept hitting me that it was all true.......my Catholic faith, Jesus present in the host, the forgiveness of sins......true. Heaven, hell, angels, demons....true. Jesus' words...true, though sometimes a bit murky.
I was thinking that maybe now during this "distance" from sacramental life that we are experiencing, I need to work on making Jesus my life.....living in him.

The first 2 parts are things that I know and assent to......but "the life" must be lived. The difference between sitting in the stands and getting in the game. Your post brought that together for me.

Glad I found this site.....gonna check in here often.

Reply
Francis Berger
5/12/2020 10:09:30

@ Brian - Thanks for the comment. I strongly believe that living in Jesus and believing on Him must form the core of Christianity going forward. The focus needs to be on our own Christology - on our own active participation rather than merely relying on passive rituals. Traditional Catholic sacramental rites can support this, but in my humble opinion, they are not enough anymore (and perhaps not even *necessary* to the further development of Christianity, especially at the individual level. (I say this as a fellow Catholic, not as some anti-Catholic fanatic).

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Mike Phillips link
5/12/2020 21:30:28

The traditional Latin Mass accompanied with the traditional Medieval life of daily sacramentals brings God into daily life: the Angelus, the Daily Office (especially for us lay people, the Little Office), the Rosary and having a traditional domestic shrine prominent in one's house occasioning one's constant signs of the Cross, reminders of offering one's little daily tasks with Our Lord's passion for the good of the souls of the world, are all there to be lived. It is just that this kind of life has been crushed by those within and without the Church. There is no other way. We humans need constant physical (spiritual is a bad word!) actions to keep us with Him - the physical presence on and still here physically sacramentally on earth!

Reply
Francis Berger
5/13/2020 06:05:18

@ Mike Phillips - As I mentioned in my previous comment, I have nothing against traditional rites serving to support an active Christian life, but I disagree with your notion that "there is no other way."

When I use the word spiritual, I am not using it in a New Agey manner, but rather in reference to transcendence and immanence - fundamental metaphysical reality.In this sense, it is very far from a "bad word." I agree with the idea that humans need constant physical actions to keep us with Him, but these constant physical actions are only valid if they are active rather than passive. Going through the motions and merely adhering to Church traditions and doctrines is not enough for it keeps us arrested at an earlier stage of development.

The focus should not only be about bringing God into our daily lives, but also bringing our daily lives into God. Our actions should work to keep us with Him, but also encourage Him to keep with us.

Reply
Mike Phillips link
5/14/2020 04:16:40

Well, I shall keep to "child-like" devotions to the traditional Latin Mass and sacramental life tried and true of the Catholic Church which fills my life with a child-like devotion to Our Lord than try "growing up".


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